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out of our hut by every means possible. We owed it to the future
generations of young people who want to enjoy scouting and all it has to
offer. We have explained that if the Parish Council did not change its plans,
we would have to move elsewhere, because there was no other option for
us and no sense in discussing using a building we would not use. Our
experience is that much of what the Parish Council has said about its
project and the scout group bears little connection to reality, but we are not
equipped for a raging publicity battle to correct everything said against us.
We have a scout group to run, and we are all volunteers.
This has all been a time-consuming tangle of huge proportions, which was
made unnecessarily more complex when the Parish Council decided to
terminate our lease in June 2020. There was no need to, it was a protected
tenancy that would have continued indefinitely, whilst leaving the parish
council free to terminate it, if and when they needed to build their project.
The lease did not ‘expire’ as they suggest, they tried to terminate it with a
Section 25 notice sprung on us without any warning or discussion.
The scout group can’t agree to the new short term lease the Parish Council
have offered instead. It is drastically different from the previous lease in its
operation, and it imposes unnecessary, expensive and onerous personal
obligations on the trustees of the scout group. It removes existing legal
rights, and it is so severe in its effects that a special “declaration" is
required for the agreement to be valid. This declaration includes warnings
underlined and in bold type such as “If you commit yourself to the lease
you will be giving up these important legal rights: [with a list of important
statutory rights set out].”
The Parish Council recently voted to refuse to even discuss offering the
scout group a long-term lease with a break clause if their project gets
funding. The council has also refused to discuss with the scout group how
to escape the impossible situation we all find ourselves in right now, and
despite attempts by third parties to help start discussions. We do not think
this situation is acceptable.
Basically, the Parish Council are offering us two dead-end options or we
have to vacate our hut. The first dead-end is the new project, which can’t
work for us. The second dead-end is a lease until 2022 and a refusal to
discuss anything longer-term, which merely delays our inevitable
departure. We will therefore have vacated the hut by the end of February
as demanded by the Parish Council, in a Covid-safe way, to try to secure a
future elsewhere. This is a tragedy. It must have been possible for the
Parish Council to replace the pavilion in a way that does not force out the